Various surgical procedures are routinely carried out intravascularly or intraluminally. For example, in the treatment of vascular disease, such as arteriosclerosis, it is a common practice to invade the vessel and insert an instrument (e.g., a balloon or other type of catheter) to carry out a procedure within the vessel. Such procedures usually involve the percutaneous puncture of the vessel so that an insertion sheath may be placed in the vessel and thereafter instruments (e.g., catheters) may pass through the sheath to an operative position within the vessel. Intravascular and intraluminal procedures unavoidably present the problem of stopping the bleeding at the percutaneous puncture after the procedure has been completed and after the instruments (and any insertion sheaths used therewith) have been removed. Bleeding from puncture sites, particularly in the case of femoral arterial punctures, is typically stopped by utilizing vascular closure devices, such as those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,090,130 and 6,045,569, which are hereby incorporated in their entireties herein by this reference.
Typical closure devices such as the ones described in the above-mentioned patents place a sealing plug at the tissue puncture site. Successful deployment of the sealing plug, however, requires that it be manually ejected from within a device sheath and compacted down to an outer surface of the tissue puncture using a compaction tube. The compaction procedure cannot commence until the device sheath (within which the compaction tube is located) has been removed so as to expose the compaction tube for manual grasping. Under certain conditions, removal of the sheath prior to compacting the sealing plug may cause the sealing plug itself to be displaced proximally from the tissue puncture, hindering subsequent placement of the sealing plug, and resulting in only a partial seal and associated late bleeding from the tissue puncture. Accordingly, there is a need for improving the mechanism for deployment of the sealing plug at the site of a tissue puncture.